Through a door-to-door survey of 769 people, Hendryx’s team found that in communities exposed to mountaintop removal mining, the cancer rate was twice as high as in communities without mining. “This significantly higher risk was found after control for age, sex, smoking, occupational exposure and family cancer history,” says Hendryx. There were extremely high levels of uterine and ovarian, skin, urinary, bone, brain, and several others forms of cancers.

The study joins a growing list of research that proves how harmful mountaintop removal mining is to our longterm health. Just last month, a different study was released showing the link between mountaintop removal and birth defects. Appalachian leaders went to Washington to called on government leaders to ask for a moratorium on all mountaintop mining in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia until the Center for Disease Control or other agencies conduct an official assessment of the health and human rights issues caused by mountaintop removal mining.

Jeff Biggers at the Huffington Post pulls out the grimy, disturbing details of mining communities’ water and air reported in Hendryx’s study:

The study goes on to explain exactly what many of these toxins are linked to:

Arsenic, for example, is an impurity present in coal that is implicated in many forms of cancer including that of skin, bladder and kidney [31, 36]. Cadmium is linked to renal cancer [34]. Diesel engines are widely used at mining sites, and diesel fuel is used for surface mining explosives, coal transportation and coal processing; diesel exhaust has been identiﬁed as a major environmental contributor to cancer risk.

Biggers also points out that despite the deadly consequences and extreme environmental destruction, mountaintop removal only accounts for 5-8 percent of our country’s coal production. Is such a small amount of massively polluting fossil fuels really worth risking the lives of millions of people?